Showing papers on "Syllable published in 2000"

The Phonology of Standard Chinese

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The Sound Inventory 3. Combinations and Variation 4. The Syllable 5. Words and Compounds 6. Stress 7. The Word length Problem 8. The Word Order Problem 9. The [r] Suffix 10. Tone: Basic Properties 11. Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) 12. Rhythm in Poetry 13. Connected Speech and Other Dialects 14. Theoretical Implications Appendix: Full Syllables in SC References Index

Quantitative characterizations of speech rhythm: syllable-timing in Singapore English.

Abstract: British English and Singapore English are said to differ in rhythmic patterning. British English is commonly described as stress-timed, but Singapore English is claimed to be syllable-timed. In the present paper, we explore the acoustic nature of the suggested cross-varietal difference. In directly comparable samples from British English and Singapore English, two types of acoustic measurements were taken; we calculated a variability index reflecting changes in vowel length over utterances, and measurements reflecting vowel quality. Our findings provide acoustic data which support the hypothesized cross-varietal difference in rhythmic patterning; we show (1) that successive vowel durations are more nearly equal in Singapore English than in British English, and (2) that reduced vowels pattern more peripherally in the F1/F2 formant space in Singapore English than in British English. We complete the paper with a comparison of our vowel variability index with a set of acoustic measures for rhythm proposed by Ramus, Nespor, and Mehler (1999), which focus on variability in vocalic and intervocalic intervals. We conclude that our variability index is more successful in capturing rhythmic differences than Ramus et al. (1999)'s measures, and that an application of our index to Ramus et al.'s intervocalic measure may provide a further diagnostic of rhythmic class.

A Phonological Model of French Intonation

Abstract: French intonation has been characterized as having a sequence of rising pitch movements. Recently, this intonation pattern has been phonologically analysed by several researchers such as Hirst and Di Cristo (1984, 1996), Mertens (1987, 1993), Di Cristo and Hirst (1993a, 1993b, 1996), (1993), 1995), and Hirst, Di Cristo, and Espesser (forthcoming), among others. These authors agree that a tone is associated with a stressed syllable, and that stress is rhythmic or postlexical. They also agree that an utterance is hierarchically organized into different prosodic levels, though some of these levels are not referred to in the same terminology. These models diverge principally in the levels of phrasing and their tonal representation. They also disagree in the notion of accent in French and in the degree of abstractness in the tonal representation, which is due to the conceptual differences linked to the application of the model: the focus is either on acoustic representation of models relevant for speech synthesis and recognition, or on abstract representation for phonological description, or on both levels.

Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints

Abstract: The principles determining secondary stress placement in English display considerable non-uniformity (Prince 1993) in their application. While in some contexts a syllable will be stressed if it is heavy, or if it is stressed in the stem of a derived form, in other environments syllable weight and stem stress do not entail secondary stress. To take a relatively straightforward case, the primary stress of the stems in (1a) is preserved as a secondary stress in the derived forms (cf. monomorphemic T`tamagouchi with initial stress), but stress preservation systematically fails in words like (1b). Here we have phonologically conditioned non-uniformity; stress preservation on light syllables is blocked in the environment of a following primary stress.

The Phonology of Portuguese

Abstract: Introduction The Phonological System of Portuguese Syllable Structure Portuguese Morphology Inflection Portuguese Morphology Derivation Word Stress in Portuguese Phonological Processes References

Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: a study of the role of experience in language production.

Abstract: Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [n] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in 4 sessions on different days. In the first 2 experiments, some consonants were always onsets, some were always codas, and some could be both. In a third experiment, the set of possible onsets and codas depended on vowel identity. In all 3 studies, the production errors that occurred respected the "phonotactics" of the experiment. The results illustrate the implicit learning of the sequential constraints present in the stimuli and show that the language production system adapts to recent experience.

Competing constraints on intergestural coordination and self-organization of phonological structures

Abstract: Within the Articulatory Phonology framework, the notion of gestural structure plays a central role. The nature of such structures has been the focus of two related lines of recent research that we present here. One line involves a proposal to enrich gestural structures to include an explicit representation of the relative cohesiveness of pairs of gestures within an utterance. As it turns out, this simple addition to the model has unexpected and interesting explanatory consequences, one of which involves the phonetic and phonological properties of syllable structure. The second line involves developing a research strategy to account for the observed properties that gestural structures exhibit in languages using principles of self-organization.

The phonology of Norwegian

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Segments: Inventory and Feature Specifications 3. Phonotactic Constraints 4. Word Phonology 5. Syllable Structure 6. Stress Assignment in Simplex Words 7. Cyclic Stress Assignment 8. Cyclic Syllabification 9. Tonal Accents 10. Intonation and Rhythm 11. Postlexical Segmental Phonology 12. Orthographic Conventions References Index

The Acquisition of Syllable Types

Abstract: In this article, we present an account of developmental data regarding the acquisition of syllable types. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech of 12 children acquiring Dutch as their first language. A developmental order of acquisition of syllable types was deduced by aligning the syllabified data on a Guttman scale. This order could be analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings in the grammar of the structural constraints ONSET, NO-CODA, *COMPLEX-O, and *COMPLEX-C; some local conjunctions of these constraints; and a faithfulness constraint FAITH. The syllable type frequencies in the speech surrounding the language learner are also considered. An interesting correlation is found between the frequencies and the order of development of the different syllable types.

Phonological conditioning of peak alignment in rising pitch accents in Dutch.

Abstract: This paper deals with the factors that influence the alignment of F0 movements with phonetic segments. It reports two experiments on the alignment of rising prenuclear pitch accents in Dutch. In experiment 1, it is shown that the final peak of the rise is aligned at the end of the vowel if the accented syllable contains a long vowel, but during the following consonant if the accented syllable contains a short vowel. The beginning of the rise is consistently aligned at the beginning of the accented syllable. Experiment 2 attempts to distinguish between two explanations for this finding: (1) a durational account, in which the F0 rise takes a certain amount of time and overruns into the following consonant if the vowel is short; and (2) a structural account, in which the peak of the rise is seen as a tonal target aligned with the end of the syllable (which is structurally earlier for long vowels than for short vowels). The data partially support both accounts. There is an alignment difference despite a lack of durational difference, which supports the structure-based account. However, the effect is reduced compared to experiment 1, showing that time pressure may work against the ideal alignment.

The phonology of Hungarian

Abstract: PART I: BACKGROUND Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Preliminaries PART II: SYSTEMS Chapter 3: The Vowel System Chapter 4: The Consonant System Chapter 5: Phonotactics: Syllable structure PART III: PROCESSES Chapter 6: Processes Involving Vowels Chapter 7: Processes Involving Consonants Chapter 8: Processes Conditioned by Syllable Structure Chapter 9: Surface Processes

The Motor Core of Speech: A Comparison of Serial Organization Patterns in Infants and Languages

Abstract: Comparison of serial organization of infant babbling and early speech with that of 10 languages reveals four movement-related design features reflecting a deep evolutionary heritage: (1) the cyclical consonant-vowel alternation underlying the syllable, a "Frame" for speech consisting of mandibular oscillation, possibly evolving from ingestive cyclicities (e.g., chewing) via visuofacial communicative cyclicities (e.g., lipsmacks); (2) three intracyclical consonant-vowel co-occurrence preferences reflecting basic biomechanical constraints-coronal consonants-front vowels, dorsal consonants-back vowels, and labial consonants-central vowels; (3) a developmental progression from above-chance to below-chance levels of intercyclical consonant repetition; (4) an ease-related labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant sequence preference for word initiation. These design features presumably result from self-organizational responses to selection pressures, primarily determined by motor factors. No explanation for these design features is available from Universal Grammar, and, except for feature 3, perceptual-motor learning seems to have only a limited causal role in acquisition of any design feature.

Generation and synthesis of prosody templates

Abstract: A method of separating high-level prosodic behavior from purely articulatory constraints so that timing information can be extracted from human speech is presented. The extracted timing information is used to construct duration templates that are employed for speech synthesis. The duration templates are constructed so that words exhibiting the same stress pattern will be assigned the same duration template. Initially, the words of input text segmented into phonemes and syllables, and the associated stress pattern is assigned. The stress assigned words are then assigned grouping features by a text grouping module. A phoneme cluster module groups the phonemes into phoneme pairs and single phonemes. A static duration associated with each phoneme pair and single phoneme is retrieved from a global static table. A normalization module generates a normalized syllable duration value based upon the retrieved static durations associated with the phonemes that comprise the syllable. The normalized syllable duration value is stored in a duration template based upon the grouping features associated with that syllable. To produce natural human-sounding prosody in synthesized speech, the duration information is then extracted from the selected template, de-normalized and applied to the phonemic information.

Phonological awareness of syllables, rhymes, and phonemes in deaf children.

Abstract: Phonological awareness is important for reading development in hearing children, in whom it develops at the three consecutive levels of the syllable, rhyme, and phoneme. Deaf children typically have literacy difficulties, and previous research has been equivocal about whether deaf children can develop phonological awareness. Three experiments are presented that investigate the phonological skills of deaf children (mean age 11 years) at the three linguistic levels of syllable, rhyme, and phoneme. The first experiment showed that deaf children's syllable awareness can be equivalent to that of chronological age-matched hearing controls. In the second experiment, deaf children's ability to make rhyme judgements was above chance, but poorer than that of younger reading-matched hearing controls. The third experiment showed that deaf children could phonologically recode nonsense words at a level above chance, suggesting that they could draw on phonemic skills in certain conditions. We conclude that deaf children can develop phonological awareness, but that their phonological skills lag those of hearing children and may develop in different ways. Differences between our tasks and those used in other studies are discussed.

The role of perception in defining tonal targets and their alignment

Abstract: Tonal targets can be defined in terms of two-dimensions, i.e., ``alignment'' and ``scaling'', where alignment specifies the exact temporal implementation of tonal highs (H) and lows (L) relative to structural elements (such as syllables and morae) and their segments. Alignment patterns might be constrained by various linguistic factors, such as phonological as well as phonetic factors. Among the phonological factors, the grammar of stress-accent languages specifies that the tones of a pitch accent must be aligned with those syllables that are marked as stressed in the lexicon. Moreover, syllable structure can constrain tune-text alignment. For instance, in Neapolitan Italian, the peak of a LH rising accent occurs closer to the offset of the stressed vowel when the vowel is in a closed syllable, and therefore short. Among the phonetic constraints, one finds facts about the perception of pitch and time, both for speech and for non-speech stimuli. This work investigates the role of alignment in determining tonal target perception for yes/no question and (narrow focus) statement contours in Neapolitan Italian. These contours are characterized by a melodic rise-fall, analyzed here as a sequence of a LH pitch accent plus a HL phrase tone. The separation of the rise and the fall is clear in the case of long focus constituents containing at least two words with independently stressed syllables. In more typical cases, however, this configuration is acoustically realized as a sequence of three tonal targets, LHL, due to ``merging'' of the H tone sequence in nuclear position. This study shows that the precise alignment of each of those tonal events influences the perception of the question/statement contrast. A read speech corpora, produced by two speakers of Neapolitan Italian, was first analyzed to acoustically characterize tonal targets in both yes/no questions and narrow focus statements, with target words differing in syllable structure and segmental environment. Later, a set of resynthesized stimuli was created, which constituted the basis for the perception experiments. Results show that, when tonal targets for the entire rise-fall are displaced later in time, more questions are identified. The results also suggest that F0 height has a minor role in signaling pitch accent differences, while rise and fall slope have no impact. Additionally, when the shape of the peak in the rise-fall is modified, so that a high plateau is created, more questions are perceived. This phenomenon cannot be accounted for in terms of a parsing difference between the question and the statement phonological tone structures, since those structures are the same. Moreover, the effect was also found for non-native listeners. Namely, American English listeners showed an effect of peak shape, as well as a similar use of the alignment contrast as a consequence of alignment modifications, when identifying questions vs. statements of Neapolitan. This result suggests a universal use of alignment and a psychoacoustic effect of perceived target displacement due to peak shape. Hence, despite acoustic and pragmatic differences between their rise-fall contrasts, American and Neapolitan listeners appear to employ similar perceptual strategies. The Neapolitan results for the syllable structure manipulation are difficult to interpret. While, on the one hand, the manipulation was not able to shift the crossover boundary between questions and statements, on the other hand the response curves for the open and closed syllable continua for the statement modality were significantly different. The results suggest that no look-ahead mechanism is employed when computing perceived target location. That is, question and statement tonal targets are computed relative to the left edge of the stressed syllable, so that stressed vowel duration (which is shorter in closed syllables) has no effect. A clear category boundary shift was found when stimuli were resynthesized from either a question base or a declarative base utterance. This suggests that cues other than target alignment are employed when computing perceived pitch accent contrast. In sum, this work proposes that temporal alignment, both as a production and a perception mechanism, must shape phonological systems of intonational contrast, both within and across languages.

Consonant cluster phonotactics : a perceptual approach

Abstract: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2000.

English and Cantonese Phonology in Contrast: Explaining Cantonese ESL Learners' English Pronunciation Problems

Abstract: It is argued that most if not all of the pronunciation problems encountered by Cantonese learners of English may be adequately accounted for by the contrastive differences discussed in this paper. The phonological differences between the two languages are examined, ranging from their phoneme inventories, the characteristics of the phonemes, the distributions of the phonemes, syllable structure, to the function of tones and their respective rhythmic patterns. At the segmental level, substitution by a related sound in the native language, deletion and epenthesis are by far the most common strategies Cantonese speakers employ when speaking or reading English. Pronunciation problems are also found at the suprasegmental level, that is, in connected speech and rhythm, resulting in the impression of a somewhat unnatural, "flat and boring" foreigner accent.

What is a starred tone? Evidence from Greek

Abstract: The theoretical construct “starred tone” is assumed without comment in virtually all autosegmental analyses of intonation. The notation on which this idea is based—the asterisk or star to indicate accent—appears to have been introduced by Goldsmith in his early discussions of English intonation (1976, 1981). Goldsmith suggested that one syllable in the syllabic tier and one tone in the melodic tier are assigned an accent, “written with an asterisk” (1981:288). The fact that both the tone—e.g. the H tone of the basic declarative contour of American English, HL or MHL, shown in (1)—and the syllable are marked with a star ensures their autosegmental association and, the theory predicts, their phonetic co-occurrence. In addition, the accentual association makes the starred syllable “prominent or ‘distinguished’” (1976:117). (1)

Prosody based endpoint detection

Abstract: A method and apparatus are provided for performing prosody based endpoint detection of speech in a speech recognition system. Input speech represents an utterance, which has an intonation pattern. An end-of-utterance condition is identified based on prosodic parameters of the utterance, such as the intonation pattern and the duration of the final syllable of the utterance, as well as non-prosodic parameters, such as the log energy of the speech.

Large vocabulary Mandarin speech recognition with different approaches in modeling tones.

Abstract: Large vocabulary continuous Mandarin speech recognition has been an important problem for speech recognition researchers for several reasons [1], [3]. First of all, it is a tonal language that requires special treatment for the modeling of tones. There are five tones in Mandarin which are necessary to disambiguate between confusable words. Secondly, the difficulty of entering Chinese by keyboard presents a great opportunity for speech recognition to improve computer usability. Previous approaches to modeling tones have included using a separate tone classifier [1] and incorporating pitch directly into the feature vector [3]. In this paper, we describe a large vocabulary Mandarin speech recognition system based on Microsoft’s Whisper system. Several alternatives in modeling tones and their error rates on continuous speech are compared. The experimental result shows a character error rate of 7.32% on a test set of 50 speakers and 1000 sentences when no special tone processing is performed in the acoustic model. When the final syllable model set is expanded to include tones, the error rate drops to 6.43% (error rate reduction of 12.2%). When pitch information and the larger final syllable set are used in combination, the error rate is 6.03% (cumulative error rate reduction of 17.6%). This result suggests that other sources of information such as energy and duration can also contribute toward disambiguating between different tones.

Sequential activation processes in producing words and syllables: Evidence from picture naming

Abstract: This study examines picture naming latencies for predicted effects of two word retrieval factors: onset complexity and number of syllables. In Experiment 1, naming latency was longer for depicted words with two syllables e.g., demon, than one syllable, e.g., duck, and longer for words beginning with consonant clusters, e.g., drill, than single consonants, e.g., duck. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed that vowel nucleus and coda complexity did not interact with onset complexity, and did not affect naming latency. Moreover, effects of onset complexity and number of syllables were additive, and unrelated to word frequency, articulatory factors, or picture complexity. These results comport with evidence from speech errors and metalinguistic tasks and with predictions of the Node Structure theory of language production, but do not support production theories that do not predict special processing difficulty for words with complex onsets and multiple syllables.

Infants' perception of the audible, visible, and bimodal attributes of multimodal syllables.

Abstract: Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Ninety-six infants in each experiment were habituated to a person mouthing and uttering a syllable and then tested for detection of changes of either the audible, visible, or combined attributes of the syllable. When the attributes of the syllable were produced in an adult-directed manner, all three age groups discriminated the audible and bimodal attribute changes but only the 8-month-olds discriminated the visible one. When the difference between the familiar and novel attributes of the syllable was enhanced by testing with a novel syllable produced in an infant-directed manner, all three age groups detected all three types of changes. Finally, to test the possible role of audiovisual synchrony in responsiveness, infants were tested with an asynchronous syllable spoken either by the same person or by a novel person following habituation to a synchronous syllable. Results suggested that at four months infants attended primarily to the featural information, at six months primarily to the asynchrony, and at eight months to both features independently. These results help identify some of the important dimensions of multimodal speech during early development.

The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior

Abstract: The Converter and Distributor (C/D) model is a generative description of articulatory gesture organization for utterances. Its input comprises specifications for syllables by features, a paraphonologically augmented metrical structure, and system parameters for utterance conditions. A syllable-boundary pulse train is computed as a time function representing the skeletal rhythmic structure of the utterance. Control functions for articulators are computed by superimposing consonantal elemental gestures onto the base function, which includes voicing, vocalic, mandibular, and tonal functions associated with the pulse train. A preliminary analysis of microbeam data for experimental dialogues, using jaw opening as an approximate measure of the syllable magnitude, inferred syllable and boundary durations consistently with durational characteristics observed in the acoustic waveform.

Reading aloud begins when the computation of phonology is complete.

Abstract: Naming latency experiments in which monosyllabic items are read aloud are based on the assumption that the vocal response is not initiated until the phonology of the entire syllable has been computed. Recently, this assumption has been challenged by A. H. Kawamoto, C. T. Kello, R. Jones, and K. Bame (1998), who argued instead that the reading-aloud response begins as soon as the initial phoneme is computed. This view would be refuted by evidence of anticipatory coarticulation effects on the initial phoneme due to the nature of the following vowel in the speeded reading-aloud task. The authors provide such evidence.

Prosodic Correlates of Stress in Babbling: An Acoustical Study

Abstract: Prelinguistic babbling often seems remarkably speech-like, not because it has recognizable words but because it seems to have adult-like prosody. To quantify this impression, we compared disyllabic sequences from five infants and five adults in terms of the use of frequency, intensity, and duration to mark stress. Significantly larger values for the three acoustic variables were observed on stressed than on unstressed syllables independent of syllable position for both groups. Adults showed the correlates of utterance final syllables--lower f0, lower intensity, and longer duration; infants showed only decrease in intensity. Ratios for stressed to unstressed syllables and participation of the three variables in stress production in individual disyllables were highly similar in both groups. No bias toward the English lexical trochaic stress pattern was observed. We conclude that infants in English environments produce adult-like stress patterns before they produce lexical items, which specify stress. Acoustic and perceptual analyses are used to explore stress marking by prelinguistic infants in an English language environment. Results show that infants employ the three acoustic correlates of stress in individual syllables in a manner largely similar to that of adult speakers, although they do not show second-syllable declination effects or an English language trochaic stress bias.

Spanish stress assignment within the analogical modeling of language

Abstract: The advent of nonlinear phonology has resulted in an explosion of studies relating to Spanish syllable structure and stress placement, but most of these studies claim to represent linguistic competence and language structure, not actual mechanisms used by speakers in speech production and comprehension. The present study is couched within Skousen's ANALOGICAL MODELING OF LANGUAGE (AML) (1989, 1992, 1995). AML attempts to reflect how speakers determine linguistic behaviors such as stress placement. According to AML, when an unfamiliar word needs to be stressed, speakers access their mental lexicon, search for words similar to the word in question, then apply the stress of the word(s) found to the word in question. The 4,970 most common Spanish words served as the database for the study. AML correctly assigned stress to about 94% of these words. The errors it made closely reflect the pattern of errors made by Spanish-speaking children in a study by Hochberg (1988). Moreover, Aske's nonce word probe (1990) showed that native speakers are sensitive to a certain subpattern in Spanish stress assignment—a subpattern which does not receive representation in rule models. The analogical model of Spanish stress mirrors Aske's findings.